Direct and indirect capture of near-Earth asteroids in the Earth–Moon system

Abstract

Near-Earth asteroids have attracted attention for both scientific and commercial mission applications. Due to the fact that the Earth-Moon L1 and L2 points are candidates for gateway stations for lunar exploration, and an ideal location for space science, capturing asteroids and inserting them into periodic orbits around these points is of significant interest for the future. In this paper, we define a new type of lunar asteroid capture, termed direct capture. In this capture strategy, the candidate asteroid leaves its heliocentric orbit after an initial impulse, with its dynamics modelled using the Sun-Earth-Moon restricted four-body problem until its insertion, with a second impulse, onto the L2 stable manifold in the Earth-Moon circular restricted threebody problem. A Lambert arc in the Sun-asteroid two-body problem is used as an initial guess and a differential corrector used to generate the transfer trajectory from the asteroid's initial obit to the stable manifold associated with Earth-Moon L2 point. Results show that the direct asteroid capture strategy needs a shorter flight time compared to an indirect asteroid capture, which couples capture in the Sun-Earth circular restricted three-body problem and subsequent transfer to the Earth-Moon 2 circular restricted three-body problem. Finally, the direct and indirect asteroid capture strategies are also applied to consider capture of asteroids at the triangular libration points in the Earth-Moon system.

Trajectory Design for Asteroid Retrieval Missions: A Short Review

“…The active role of the Moon in the process of capturing an asteroid is also investigated by Mingotti et al [31] and Tan et al [14]. In these cases, however, the design strategy focuses on exploiting the stable hyperbolic manifold structures associated with periodic orbits in the Earth-Moon CR3BP.…”

Multifidelity Design of Low-Thrust Resonant Captures for Near-Earth Asteroids

“…A substantial amount of work has not targeted a specific final capture orbit, but has instead considered the energy conditions to enable permanent (or quasi-permanent) capture within the Earth's sphere of influence [13][14][15][16][17][18]. Another common approach is to target a specific final orbit for the captured object: LDROs for NASA's ARRM concept [11,12], Sun-Earth Libration Point orbits (LPOs) [19][20][21][22] or Earth-Moon LPOs [23,24].…”

Capture of small near-Earth asteroids to Earth orbit using aerobraking

“…Most recent research work has investigated the possibility of capturing near-Earth asteroids in the vicinity of the Earth, including the Sun-Earth libration points L1 and L2 [9][10][11][12], the neighbourhood of the Moon [13][14][15] and bound orbits about the Earth itself [8,16,17]. As vantage points for space observatories, and candidate gateways for future deep space exploration, the Sun-Earth L1 and L2 points also serve as the ideal locations for captured asteroids due to their unique locations and dynamical characteristics [18].…”

“…Based on the results of capturing asteroids around the Sun-Earth L1 and L2 points, the idea of capturing asteroids around the Earth-Moon L2 point has also been investigated by patching stable manifolds in the Earth-Moon system and unstable manifolds in the Sun-Earth system [14]. To save flight time, a direct asteroid capture strategy was also defined by designing a direct transfer between the candidate asteroid's orbit and the appropriate stable manifold associated with the Earth-Moon L2 point using differential corrections [15]. Furthermore, there exists two types of asteroid capture strategies around the Earth, corresponding to two different dynamical models.…”